Thursday, January 16, 2014

FREE Online Audio Books for Elementary, Middle, and High School Students!

In every content class, students have assigned readings to meet common core demands as well as gain a more detailed insight into the subject matter at hand. However, school budgets are not as rich as they were a few years back and many more children of poverty are in classes from kindergarten through high school. So, how are teachers to nurture an interest in reading with limited funds?

Fortunately, many popular reading materials are online for free and many of those books have audio versions. For ELLs, audio books provide meaning to text since most ELLs develop listening skills before reading. Using such material would assist ELLs in keeping up with demands of content classes. How would they access the books? The vast majority of kids regardless of their socioeconomic status possess cell phones (think of them as mini-computers). With these tools, they can follow the assigned readings at home via their phones.

Of course, for students to gain maximum benefit from the books, teachers would need to guide them through the process, provide flow charts for students to take notes, identify the possible glitches readers face with online audiobooks along with suggestions to solve those issues when they arise, saving the page where they left off, and so on.

For students to learn to enjoy reading, they need a vast library to pick from so that they can find just the right book:)

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About Me

I am an educator, adjunct professor, educational consultant, and teacher trainer who has been meeting the many language needs of non-native speakers of English for close to 30 years. I continue to love what I do as much as I did when I first entered the ELD classroom (ELD in California, but ESL everywhere else). What I hope to do here is to share successes, failures, hopes, frustrations, etc. in trying to teach these students. It is my hope that many teachers will join and share as well. What we can do here will benefit us all, but especially the ELL.